Communication
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Item Rhetorical Contingency and Affirmative Action: The Paths to Diversity in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke(2010) Carr, Martha Kelly; Parry-Giles, Trevor S.; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), the Supreme Court issued a landmark decision addressing the constitutionality of university affirmative action policies. Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. concluded that universities could consider race as a factor to achieve the goal of a diverse student body. This study situates Bakke within its broader rhetorical environment of public discourses about race, law, and education, examining the selection process by which Powell found “diversity” to be the most justifiable answer to the question of affirmative action's permissibility. Using materials retrieved from Powell's archives at Washington and Lee University, including memoranda, personal notes, and draft opinions, the project makes three interrelated arguments. First, this study asserts that the Supreme Court is a rhetorical institution, dependent upon rhetoric for its inventional needs and its credibility while simultaneously cloaking its reliance on rhetorical invention in a rhetoric of formalistic inevitability. As such, it attends to how the legal invention process, explicated by classical rhetorical theorists and manifest in contemporary legal practice, enhances understanding of Powell's decision. Second, the project examines how Powell pulled from far-reaching rhetorical and ideological environments for his “diversity” rationale. Here, the study traces public discourses about race and examines Bakke's legal briefs, outlining the appeals to multiculturalism, colorblindness, race consciousness, and individualism that comprised Powell's inventional warehouse. A critical scrutiny of Powell's opinion-writing process reveals an inventional program guided by an ideological negotiation of these competing and compelling rhetorics of race and education in the United States. Third, this project argues that Powell's opinion-writing process is a corporate, rather than individual, process. Examining the negotiations between Powell, his law clerks, and fellow justices further illuminates the rhetorical nature of the Court, as well as the ideological influences upon individual Court opinions. The study concludes by explicating how Bakke reflects the ways that the Supreme Court works as part of a broader rhetorical culture, constructing its decisions from the materials of public arguments and the architecture of jurisprudential norms. Finally, the study explores the ideological circulation of Powell's decision: divorcing the goal of diversity from the justification of past discrimination.Item Identity, power, and difference: The management of roles and self among public relations practitioners(2007-10-09) Tindall, Natalie T.J.; Aldoory, Linda; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Public relations is important to organizations because this function has boundary spanning roles and responsibilities. Public relations practitioners work between the organization and various publics to communicate messages in an effort to inform and influence the organization's leadership and dominant coalition and to inform and effect change among the organization's stakeholders. According to public relations theory, the communicators in the public relations department must match the diversity in the internal and external populations the organizations serve (e.g., L. A. Grunig, J. E. Grunig, & Dozier, 2000; Sha & Ford, 2007). However, public relations has been called a "lily-white profession" (Layton, 1981) and has been classified as "gay industry" (Woods & Lucas, 1993). Recent surveys about the field have indicated modest changes in the profession's demographic makeup (cf. 2005 PR Week Diversity Survey). The aim of this dissertation research is to examine and explore how power and identity merge and diverge in the everyday, professional lives of minority public relations practitioners. This research identified how these practitioners navigate through organizational networks, how they manage identity in their organizations, and how these practitioners interpret the concept of power. To recognize how practitioners interpret their experiences in organizations and to examine the meaning-making of practitioners, I needed the resulting product to be descriptive data that could be unraveled and clarified, then bracketed back to the Excellence Theory of public relations. Therefore, I utilized qualitative methodology. I conducted in-depth interviews with 51 public relations practitioners of various backgrounds--African American and Hispanic heterosexual practitioners; white lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) practitioners; and African American and Hispanic gay male practitioners. The findings revealed some particularly distinct themes. Black and Hispanic public relations practitioners and lesbian, gay male, and bisexual (LGB) public relations practitioners encountered heterosexism, racism, sexism, and occasionally all of these prejudices at the same time. As research participants encountered these barriers, they said they simultaneously resisted and enacted countermeasures to avoid those pitfalls. Power was perceived as having access to knowledge; access and control of financial resources; holding a seat in the dominant coalition; and having a high-ranking position in the organization. Participants achieved power and empowerment in their organizational roles through various avenues--avenues such as mentoring, seeking social support, and reaching out.